No Pain, No Brain

Are you ready to invent the future?  Think big and tell us how you would create it! We are looking for game-changing and impactful ideas that have the potential to change the way we live, work, and communicate with each other.

-The Bell Labs Prize Application, April 2016

Emilio Chapela’s third solo show with the gallery unfolds in two-parts featuring a series of sculptures, sound installations and appropriated artifacts from Bell Labs’ Holmdel, New Jersey headquarters. Since its founding in 1925, Bell Labs has produced eight Nobel Prize-winning discoveries including the transistor, the laser, and the charge-coupled device (CCD) to name a few. From its prime in the 1930s until the end of the AT&T monopoly in the 1980s, Bell Labs spawned an invisible nervous system that launched the digital revolution and changed our social network forever.  Additionally, Bell Labs played a pioneering role in artistic fields in the name of research—music, film, animation and computer graphics—through direct collaborations with a host of artists including Laurie Spiegel, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and many more.